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The Darkening Trapeze: Last Poems of Larry Levis
On April 2, 2016, poets Mark Doty, Carolyn Forché, and Linda Gregerson participated in a panel discussion on The Darkening Trapeze (Graywolf Press, 2016), a collection of Larry Levis’s last poems, published twenty years after his death. The panel, which took place in the Los Angeles Convention Center, was part of the annual conference hosted by the Association of Writers & Writing Programs. The discussion was moderated by The Darkening Trapeze editor, David St. John. 
Mark Doty is the author of numerous books of poetry and nonfiction, most recently Deep Lane: Poems (W. W. Norton & Company. 2015). He is the recipient of numerous literary awards, including the Whiting Writer’s Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the 2008 National Book Award for Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins, 2008). Doty has also received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Carolyn Forché is the author of four books of poetry including The Angel of History (HarperCollins, 1994), which received the 1994 Los Angeles Times Book Award. She has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. A former Lannan Visiting Professor of Poetry, Forché is a professor of English and the director of the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.
Linda Gregerson is the author of six books of poetry, including Waterborne (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002), which won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, and other journals. She has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 2015 she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Gregerson is a distinguished professor of English at the University of Michigan, where she directs the creative writing program.
David St. John is the author of twelve poetry collections, including The Last Troubadour (forthcoming from Ecco Press, 2017), and the editor of The Darkening Trapeze: Last Poems (Graywolf Press, 2016), a posthumous collection by the poet Larry Levis. He was the recipient of the Prix de Rome Prize Fellowship, the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the O.B. Hardison Prize in Poetry from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and multiple fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is university professor and chair of English and comparative literature at the University of Southern California.